As Techcrunch reported US group buying industry leader Groupon filed SEC registration statement (S-1 form). Groupon plans to attract $750M of capital . Unfortunately from the article and SEC filing it is not clear what number of shares and the percentage of ownership will be offered, but rumored valuation (according SmartCompany and Wall Street Journal) is around $20-25 billion.
There are some interesting financial data about the company performance till 1st quarter (ended March 31) of 2011. I put the most important numbers in the table below (all numbers are in thousands):
| 2009 | 2010 | 2011(Jan-Mar) | |
| Revenue | $30,471 | $713,365 | $644,728 |
| Cost of revenue | $19,542 | $433,411 | $374,728 |
| Gross profit | $10,929 | $279,954 | $270,000 |
| Gross margin | 35.87% | 39.24% | 41.88% |
| Operational expenses | $12,006 | $700,298 | $387,148 |
| Loss from operations | -$1,077.00 | -$420,344.00 | -$117,148.00 |
| Net loss | -$6,916 | -$456,320 | -$146,480 |
| Net margin | -22.70% | -63.97% | -22.72% |
Another extremely important piece of data is that Groupon’s cash remaining at March 31, 2011 is $209M.
So, if the current trend of losses continues, the company will burn all the cash in 3rd quarter of 2011.
As Jennier Van Grove wrote in Mashable appeared that most financing from previous rounds (series F and G) was cashed by founders and early investors, only $151.4 million went to company. CEO Andrew Mason cashed almost $28 million, co-founder Eric Lefkofsky sold shares on $382 million. So now Groupon goes public and asking for more money to finance it’s growth.
There are also some operational information:
| 2009 (year) | 2010 (year) | 2010 (Jan-Mar) | 2011 (Jan-Mar) | |
| Subscribers(1) | 1,807,278 | 50,583,805 | 3,434,610 | 83,100,006 |
| Cumulative customers(2) | 375,099 | 9,031,807 | 874,017 | 15,803,995 |
| Featured merchants(3) | 2,695 | 66,289 | 2,903 | 56,781 |
| Groupons sold(4) | 1,248,792 | 30,296,070 | 1,760,398 | 28,094,743 |
(1) Reflects the total number of subscribers on the last day of the applicable period.
(2) Reflects the total number of unique customers that have purchased Groupons from January 1, 2009 through the last day of the applicable period.
(3) Reflects the total number of merchants featured in the applicable period.
(4) Reflects the total number of Groupons sold in the applicable period.
For more information you can check SEC web site and read the S-1 form
Regarding operational data it’s interesting that one of Australian group buying leader, Scoopon has just announced that they sold 1,000,000 coupons and reportedly has around 500,000 subscribers.